2/27/17

In a shocking turn of events, I actually finished this week's tutorial segment last night! This means that I was done a full day early, and I've opted to post the new segment this morning before I head to work.

The trick this time was starting early. I finished the followup last weekend, then did half of the work on Saturday and the rest on Sunday. I'm pretty sure that if I keep to this formula, then I should be able to keep up with the schedule without causing myself too much stress.

As for the contents, I'm continuing my policy of "give the reader some fun stuff early on" by sharing a couple simple random generation algorithms. In my old plan for the tutorial, this probably wouldn't have happened until part 6 or 7 (we're on part 4), so I think this was a good move. I'm also trying to get through things quickly because (as I said before) I'm still not 100% happy with this tutorial and would like to get it out of the way so that I can focus on making better-planned tutorials in the future.

Lastly, I wanted to say that I'm going to try and revive the old one post a week policy from my college days. I've actually been working pretty hard on a couple of interesting projects lately, so this will give me an opportunity to share them on non-tutorial weeks. I'm painfully aware of the fact that the tutorial is the only thing I've written about this year and it's nearly March.

2/14/17

I almost had this weeks segment done last night, but I was quite tired and decided to put it off. That was apparently a good decision, since I put several hours into it today before wrapping up! This was mostly poor time management on my part, but I'm happy that the delay was small this time.

As for the content, I'm trying to accelerate the early bits a bit more than in my previous iterations. Even for a long-running series, it's important to keep the readers engaged, and the shape drawing from last time didn't seem up to snuff. I'm taking a bit of a write once, refactor later approach this time: I present the technique in a fairly simple and "bad" way first, then show how the implementation can be refined and improved later. This allows me to frontload much of the exciting stuff, while still providing some basic design lessons down the line. We'll see how that goes.

This series has really been a bit of an interesting experiment for me. There are so many things wrong with my approach to writing these that I almost want to start fresh again, but for the sake of actually getting things done I'm resisting that urge. I think this series is helping me learn a lot about tutorials though, and future seasons will benefit from those lessons.